Saturday, January 08, 2005

Open War in Iraq...

While the world's attention has been on the disaster in Asia, the situation in Iraq has deteriorated so much that the insurgency has developed into near-open warfare. The head of Iraq's intelligence service Gen Muhammad Shahwani now puts the number of insurgents at 200,000, of which 40,000 are said to be the hard core and the rest active supporters. These figures do not represent an insurgency. They represent a war.

Until recently, the US military has talked of there being about 25,000 fighters in Iraq. Gen Shahwani has not just upped the estimate, but has put it into the wider context of the active guerrilla support which perhaps gives a truer picture. There are 150,000 US troops. ...The level of attacks is now so intense and sophisticated that it is not surprising that the former British representative to the former Coalition Authority, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, said recently that the insurgency was "irremediable" and "ineradicable" by US and other foreign troops alone.

"It depends on the Iraqis. We have lost the primary control," he said.

Recent events indicate that Iraqis have lost the primary control as well. This is not good... The following might be...

The Pentagon is sending a retired senior general to Iraq to review overall military operations there.

A spokesman said Gen Gary Luck would mainly assess progress in training Iraqis to take over security - a key exit strategy for US forces. ...As well as assessing Iraqi forces, he will also look at overall US operations against insurgents, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.

A surprising development... not.

...and far from being able to cut US troop numbers as it had hoped, the Pentagon now has more personnel in Iraq than ever - more than 150,000.

As a result, a senior US army official has also said the army is likely to ask for a permanent increase of 30,000 in its strength.

And some validation for Rumsfeld...

The seven soldiers killed on Friday were travelling in a Bradley armoured fighting vehicle.The Bradley is the most heavily-protected US vehicle after the Abrams tank. Who needs armor in an open war? If your card is drawn, you are still going to die.

The Army Reserve is unable to meet its missions in Iraq and Afghanistan because of "dysfunctional" personnel policies that senior Army and Pentagon officials have refused to change, its top general has told senior Army leaders.

“The Army Reserve is unable to meet its missions in Iraq and Afghanistan because of ‘dysfunctional’ personnel policies that senior Army and Pentagon officials have refused to change, its top general has told senior Army leaders. The officer, Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, said in a memorandum that the demands of overseas commitments combined with restrictive mobilization policies were hampering the Reserve's ability to fill such essential jobs as engineers, truck drivers and civil affairs specialists….The Reserves, General Helmly said, are ‘rapidly degenerating into a “broken” force.’”